Veranstaltungen

What can be done to counter populist and anti-European movements and keep Europe united? What role can the EU play to advance economic prosperity for its citizens? And how can the EU be a relevant player in a new global (dis-)order?

To celebrate Helmut Schmidt’s 100th birthday, the international symposium Rethinking Europe invites the world’s leading experts on European and international affairs to discuss the most pressing questions about Europe’s future – 100 days before the European elections. Three “Schmidt-topics” are in focus: foreign and security policy, economic and fiscal policy, as well as institutional affairs of the EU.

Among the confirmed speakers are

Ivan Krastev, Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia

Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-chief of The Economist

Karen Donfried, President of the German Marshall Fund of the United States

Sylvie Goulard, Deputy governor of the Banque de France

Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center

The complete and updated program is available atwww.helmut-schmidt.de. The event is jointly organized by the Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Foundation, the Körber Foundation, the German Institute for Economic Research, and the Jacques Delors Institute – Berlin.

To participate, please register here for one of the limited available places.

The paper analyses the evolution of inequality in Italy from 1989 to 2014, focusing on three business-cycle phases: the 1992 currency crisis, the moderate growth from 1993 to 2007, and the double-dip recession from 2008 to 2013. Data from the national accounts and the Bank of Italy’s Survey on Household Income and Wealth are used. Results show that income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, rose sharply during the recession of the early 1990s but much less during the recent double-dip recession, though the share of people at risk of poverty rose similarly during the two crises. The stability of (synthetic) distributive inequality measures is explained by the fact that the reduction in income during the double-dip recession hit the whole population. Despite this apparent stability, two changes stand out: the widening gap between the young and the elderly and the fact that the deterioration in living conditions was borne wholly by households whose primary earner was foreign born.

In recent years, there has been growing public and political opposition against the principle of free movement of labor within the European Union. Already before the first EU Eastern enlargement in 2004, potential adverse labor market effects for natives in the old EU Member States were widely discussed. Despite these discussions, there is little ex-post research on the impact of EU Eastern enlargement on old Member States' labor markets. In our paper, we want to study how the EU Eastern enlargement affected the Austrian labor market. First, we provide a descriptive analysis of the development of labor supply from the new EU Member States in the Austrian labor market with a focus on the period around their EU entry and free labor market access. Second, we want to exploit the observed patterns in immigration from the EU8 countries that joined in 2004 to identify the effect on the Austrian labor market. More precisely, we want to use variation in the EU8 worker density on the community level over time and over the distance to the closest EU8 border. We find that the share of EU8 employees among all employees in Austria increased by a factor of four from 2003 to 2015. With free access, we see a shift in the composition of migrant workers toward lower-qualified and younger groups. We can further show that the inflow of EU8 employment over time is larger in communities closer to the border.

On Monday, November 19, the 5th DIW Europe Lecture was held on "How Europe can cooperate to compete" by EU Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager. DIW president Marcel Fratzscher welcomed and introduced Margrethe Vestager. After the lecture Commissioner Vestager attended a meet and greet session with fellows of the Berlin Centre for Consumer Policies (BCCP). An audio recording of the Europe Lecture is available here.

Ashoka Mody is Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor in International Economic Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. He is author of Euro Tragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts.Previously, Professor Mody was Deputy Director in the International Monetary Fund’s Research and European Departments. He has worked at the World Bank, AT&T’s Bell Laboratories, and the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Financial Studies, Frankfurt. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Boston University.

Marcel Fratzscher is President of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) and Professor of Macroeconomics and Finance at Humboldt-University Berlin. He is member of the United Nations High-level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, of the advisory board of the German development, non-profit Deutsche Welthungerhilfe and of the supervisory board of the Hertie School of Governance.

by Arup Banerji, Regional Director for the European Union countries, The World Bank Group

and Christian Bodewig, Program Leader for Inclusive Growth, The World Bank Group

Since its foundation more than 60 years ago, the European Union (EU) has become the modern world’s greatest “convergence machine,” propelling poorer, and newer, member states to become high-income economies, and delivering to its citizens some of the highest living standards and lowest levels of income inequality in the world. Today, however, Europeans are increasingly realizing that convergence is by no means automatic. Since the 1990s, population inequality has increased in many parts of the EU as low-income Europeans fall back on the labor market. Also the productivity gap between the southern and northern member states has widened since the early 2000s. The EU is growing, but Europeans "are not growing together". But why? Growing United argues that technological change, by revolutionizing product and labor markets, is slowing down the old convergence machine: technology offers ever-richer opportunities for well-skilled workers and frontier firms, while low-skilled workers and less productive firms risk falling behind. As a result, countries and regions that provide fewer opportunities for people to build relevant skills and a less supportive environment for firms to thrive are losing ground. This calls for upgrading Europe’s convergence machine, to seize the benefits of technological change for all Europeans. Growing United argues that the convergence machine, version 2.0, should focus on the convergence of opportunities for people and firms across the Union. It should support the capabilities of people (skills) and firms (innovation), and provide a level playing field for people and firms through “flexicure” labor markets and an enabling business environment.

Panel discussion with:Arup Banerji, Regional Director for the European Union countries for the World Bank Group. Until January 2016, he was the Senior Director and Head of the Social Protection and Labor Global Practice at the World Bank Group, and concurrently the Senior Director for the Jobs Group, overseeing the World Bank’s operations, strategy and knowledge work on employment and labor markets, social safety nets, and social insurance/pensions issues. He is a research fellow at the Institute for Labour Economics (IZA) in Bonn, Germany, and an invited member of three of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Councils—on Youth Unemployment, on Inclusive Growth and on India.

Marcel Fratzscher, President of DIW Berlin. He is Professor of Macroeconomics and Finance at Humboldt-University Berlin, and Chair of the German government expert committee on "Strenghtening investment in Germany". Moreover, he is member of the advisory board of the German development, non-profit Deutsche Welthungerhilfe and member of the supervisory board of the Hertie School of Governance.

Moderation by: Mathilde Richter, Spokeswoman of DIW Berlin

To participate, we kindly ask you to register at events@diw.de by June 27, 2018.

Economists have discussed extensively what to do to reform the European Project and how, but have been broadly silent on who and when. Which institutions and rules are needed, and when? This eBook shows that such institutional questions, although seldomly raised, are of fundamental importance for the future of European integration.

To participate, we kindly ask you to register at events@diw.de by June 20, 2018.

The Forum will bring together all BCCP fellows in law and economics who are engaged in the activities of the science campus. We will have the opportunity to learn about each other’s research during short presentations by the different partner institutions followed by open discussion. The objective of the meeting is to encourage discourse and exchange and clarify the themes and aims of BCCP.

Who and what is Germany in 2018? Among the things the country is known for are its consensus-based politics, its conservative social values, its egalitarian social-market economy, its collaborative and incrementalist firms and, on the international stage, its economic assertiveness combined with military reticence. Now, as Angela Merkel's (probably) final term as chancellor gets going after an unprecedented five months of coalition talks, all of those familiar traits are under pressure or in flux.

The arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants is accelerating the transformation of a once comparatively homogeneous nation into an Einwanderungsland or "immigration country". Politics is more heated and more fragmented than before. Debates rage about meaning of Heimat, or homeland, about who belongs and who does not. New social divides are opening up. Germany's main industries, particularly the automotive sector, remain world-class but face an intense period of disruption. Meanwhile the refugee crisis and the recent elections of Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron all, in different ways, challenge Berlin's traditional foreign policy doctrines and demand more of the country on the world stage.

In a new Special Report for The Economist, Jeremy Cliffe documents "the new Germans", a nation more open, plural and fragmented than before. The changes roiling Europe's largest economy, he argues, will force it to question established habits.

This study measures the effect of tax-benefit policies on female labor supply based on a broad sample of 26 European countries in 2005-2010. The tax-benefit microsimulation model EUROMOD is used to calculate a measure of work incentives at the extensive margin - the participation tax rate, which is then used as the main explanatory variable in a female employment equation. This allows me to deal with the endogeneity of income in a new way by using a simulated instrumental variable based on a fixed EU-wide sample of women. Results suggest that a 10 percentage point increase in the participation tax rate decreases the female employment probability by 2 percentage points. The effect is higher for single mothers, for women in the middle of the skills distribution, and in countries that have lower rates of female employment.

The Forum will bring together all BCCP fellows in law and economics who are engaged in the activities of the science campus. We will have the opportunity to learn about each other’s research during short presentations by the different partner institutions followed by open discussion. The objective of the meeting is to encourage discourse and exchange and clarify the themes and aims of BCCP.

The DIW Europe Lecture is a lecture series by leading policy-makers and academics on the future of Europe. The series aims at fostering and informing the debate on key European policy issues, and at bringing this debate to the heart of Germany's policy-making in Berlin.

The President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, will look at Europe’s economic and financial future: which challenges will Europe and the European Central Bank have to face in the months and years ahead?

The DIW Europe Lecture is a lecture series by leading policy-makers and academics on the future of Europe. The series aims at fostering and informing the debate on key European policy issues, and at bringing this debate to the heart of Germany's policy-making in Berlin.

The Forum will bring together all BCCP fellows in law and economics who are engaged in the activities of the science campus. We will have the opportunity to learn about each other’s research during short presentations by the different partner institutions followed by open discussion. The objective of the meeting is to encourage discourse and exchange and clarify the themes and aims of BCCP.

As highlighted in the IMF's article IV consultation report for the euro area, investment across the euro area remains below its pre crisis level. Its performance has been weaker than in most previous recessions and financial crises. The IMF analysis shows that much of this weakness can be explained by output dynamics, but that since the sovereign debt crisis, a high cost of capital, financial constraints, corporate leverage, and uncertainty have further held back investment in parts of the euro area.

To participate, we kindly ask you to register at events@diw.de by October 20, 2014.